A Way Out

“And they’ll have to be all drawn in, like this,” the woman said, wide-eyed, and then she demonstrated, tucking in her arms and legs to indicate how little space you would have if you were a Chilean miner being pulled from the dark depths—this from a New Yorker whose thoughts on narrow egress are usually limited to avoiding the elevators at Bloomingdale’s during the Christmas season. She had been watching television for hours and had the whole drill down.

“It’s about the afterlife, about Hades and the underworld and being saved from them,” a computer scientist said, riding the No. 6 train at rush hour. “That’s why we’re obsessed with it. It recalls our deepest mythical images of rebirth and renewal.”

“You know what it is?” a novelist, seated nearby, said. “The miners don’t want anything. They just want to get out.”

Chilean miner madness: it has been the condition of the past week in New York City, despite the fact that it is, in essence, a small story involving a country that no one has paid much attention to, and with no obvious ripples affecting us here in the United States. Doubtless the Shock Doctrinites could find an American to blame (we forced them down there to extract the resources), and the Wall Street Journal an American entrepreneur to credit—we made the drill bit that drilled the hole for the capsule thingy (and, in an op-ed on Thursday, the paper really did). And yet who wouldn’t be moved by hearing the Chilean national anthem, sung by proud Chileans as the miners rose to the surface. Chilean exceptionalism! It’s a beautiful thing.

The truth is that this was an honest-to-God human-interest story, whose appeal is the eternal appeal of all child-down-a-well stories; it is a story of something bad that turned out fine in the end. In the repetitive ribbon of stories that enwrap our existence, there are too few tales of this kind: people get killed, homes get invaded, planes go down, and although “redemption” is supposed to be achieved through one uplifting frame or another, usually the one who gets redeemed isn’t the one who got damaged in the first place. In the movies, we are taught that if something bad happens to someone, somebody better-looking will learn from it. In “Pearl Harbor,” the sight of struggling sailors, drowning below-decks, serves as a useful reminder to Ben Affleck of how he ought to feel about Kate Beckinsale. (Warmly.) Only in a handful of stories, curiously set in places very high or very low—astronauts lost in space, mountaineers marooned on summits, and these trapped miners—is there hope of a true happy ending, in which losses are restored and sorrows cease.

New York being an island of prospective screenwriters, many possible versions of the Chilean miner-madness movie were already on the table: the “Red River” version, starring Tommy Lee Jones as the grizzled mining vet who rides hard on the youngsters down in the hole; the version starring Bruce Willis as the American cowboy who was called home from Afghanistan to drill the hole, in competition with other hole-drilling Americans (“God damn it, man, this isn’t about us anymore—it’s about those men down there!”); and the version in which the Chileans, and their mine, are relocated to West Virginia, where the men can be blonder and speak English. The real heroes are hard to dramatize—the rescue workers who went down into the mine to show the miners how the rescue would work, and then stayed there till the end. True courage is mostly choices, not gestures—difficult to make dramatic.

In the midst of it all, three significant facts got lost: what was being mined (copper and gold); how much a Chilean miner typically earns (sixteen hundred dollars a month); and how many Chilean miners have died in accidents in the past decade (about three hundred and forty).

At the end of the week, after every miner was up, safe and sound, it was odd to see how eager the TV anchors were to insist that the worst lay ahead for them—and not just for the miner whose mistress showed up in place of his wife. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, but let’s not underestimate the power of post-traumatic stress delight: thirty-three men can now say, for the rest of their lives, “At least I’m not trapped down at the bottom of a mine.” Certainly, veterans of war suffer, but many also shine with the quiet feeling that, from now on, life can never get quiet enough. People are trapped by circumstances; other people help them. There is a way out. Since this is the fable that every life hopes to trace, maybe the madness isn’t so mad at all. ♦

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